


All the World Gradually Reappears

by aliquotscum



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 07:41:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6509014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliquotscum/pseuds/aliquotscum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two cars Ford has been in, and two rides he might have taken with different ghosts in tow. Sometimes it's easier to talk to people when you have an excuse not to face each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the World Gradually Reappears

**Author's Note:**

> Not 100% sure where this came from, but here it is. Title is from Deborah Ager's poem "Morning," because ??? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ ??? titles. Please enjoy!

The car was an unambitious mustard yellow color, in need of new upholstery, and even at higher speeds it _trundled_ in a way Ford usually only associated with elderly cartoon elephants. But it was his and his alone in a way nothing this big ever had been before, and that made it remarkable, even apart from the series of scratches and dents on the back bumper shaped uncannily like the state of Maryland. He hadn’t picked it, obviously. But then again he hadn’t asked for it, or dared to. And as much as he was already giving himself a headache plotting out the logistics of driving the thing all the way back to campus at the end of break and finding a place for it there, he had to admit, it was a generous gift and it would be useful to have in the long run.

 Once he remembered how to drive, anyway.

“Turn signal, sweetie,” his mother said, checking her hair in the rear-view mirror as they lurched around a corner on two out of four wheels. The curb helpfully bounced them back into the right lane, where gravity welcomed them with a vengeance. Three grocery bags collided in the backseat in a cataclysm of glass, and Ford could only hope that the jar he heard fall out and roll across the carpet wasn’t among the wounded. His mother adjusted her grip around the carton of eggs and bottle of Manischewitz she’d elected to keep safe in her lap when they left the store, but otherwise made no comment. “Anyway, where was I?”

Ford hastily shoved his glasses back into place. “Uh,” he said. “Mrs. Duncan.”

 “Right, that old bat.” His mother clicked her tongue. “Calls me up three times a week these days, wanting me to channel her dead husband so she can get his advice on every little thing. No no, baby, keep on straight for another block, there’s construction. She’s redecorating the house, see,” she explained, while Ford wrestled with the steering wheel. “Been fighting his ghost tooth and nail about her new curtain patterns since October.”

 “Really?” Ford blinked. “I thought Mr. Duncan was a benevolent guiding spirit at peace on the other side.” It had been a long time since he’d listened in on any of The Astonishing Madame Pines’ otherworldly conferences, but he at least remembered the ones they—that _he_ had been recruited to help make spooky atmospheric background noises for. He’d built a theremin in seventh grade. The Duncans warranted, at most, a squeaky violin scale.

 “Yeah, well, that was before I had another mouth to feed and you needed all your fancy college gear,” his mother said. She leaned over to roll the window down and fished for something in her purse, wedged between her heels on the floor. “So now he ain’t so benevolent. You should thank your stars the woman has rotten taste anyway. Almost makes it too easy.”

Ford squirmed. “I know some professors at school who need an assistant,” he said. “It would take a while to pay you and Dad back, but it’s steady enough. Or I could always find work off-campus, with this.” 

“Ha! Wait ’til after dinner to tell your father that, or he’ll start circling listings for ya at the table.” The lighter flared to life in his mother’s hands, throwing sparks. She held it steady to the cigarette in her mouth until it did its job, then shut it with a determined click. “We do alright,” she assured him, after taking a long first drag. “You wanna help, I ain’t gonna stick my nose up. But it won’t kill you to have a little free time, smart guy.” The edge in her voice never fully softened, in Ford’s experience, but it glanced to one side sometimes when she wanted it to. “Maybe make some friends, huh?”

“I have—“ Somehow the pothole on Sixth Avenue had tripled in size while he was away. They sailed into it hard enough to bounce him half a foot out of his seat. “I have friends,” Ford finished, once they were free again. “There’s a graduate student in Engineering I’ve been splitting a study room with all year! We even have an extracurricular in common. It’s…” He approached the idea of explaining that he was a grown adult who still played board games, then hastily pushed that idea off a bridge. “…Creative writing and tactical conflict resolution exercises, mostly.”

“Yeah? Sounds nice. You should invite him to visit next time.”

The trip from Backupsmore to Glass Shard Beach took too many hours each way for anyone truly academically committed to justify, let alone with the course load he had charted out for the next few years. “Next time,” Ford agreed, feeling only a little guilty for lying.

The stoplight at Fourth and Ocean was just turning yellow as they rolled up towards it. In another time, in another car, Ford would have braced himself for a reckless charge through it while someone ignored his protests and crowed about _the moment of truth_. Now, in this one, he pressed the brake responsibly and rolled to a slightly stuttering halt to wait his turn.

As they idled, he remembered that this was the single longest red light operating in North America, and maybe principle could have made an exception. But it was too late for that, so he stifled a sigh and kept his eyes diligently ahead to watch for his signal. Neither of them spoke, but even in the failing daylight Ford had enough peripheral vision left to know he was being watched. He raised his eyebrows and smiled a little in spite of himself. “Something on my face, Ma?”

“What, I can’t even look atcha now?” He could tell she was grinning. “I’m just thinkin’. Hard to believe my little genius is all grown up and making it out there on his own.”

The light finally turned. Ford hit the gas too hard, then the brake, then the gas again with more conviction. “I’m certainly trying,” he said.

“Certainly.” His mother twisted to tap her ashes out the window. “As it happens,” she began, two blocks later, in what Ford had come to recognize in the past year as her careful voice, “I got an…interesting phone call last week. My business line, not the house number. Long distance.”

Ford turned onto their street and felt a screw tightening in his jaw. “Mm.”

“And not to go into details or nothing, not to make a big production out of it, but let’s say maybe there’s some other folks trying to make it out there too.”

Ford thought, in rapid succession: _I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to deal with this now, I don’t want to know._ He said, clumsily: “I don’t want to.”

“It’s just an address on a notecard,” his mother pressed. There was worry in her tone, and he hated that he heard it. “A little motel out west a ways. Might not even be good for very long, but I thought, well, better write it down just in case. 

The steering wheel groaned under Ford’s knuckles. _Don’t say it_ , he thought. 

“And maybe with a little extra mobility, if anyone were so inclined, it wouldn’t be such an imposition to—“

He didn’t mean to snap so suddenly, or slam on the brakes so hard, but he did both anyway. The car rocked noisily on its frame and something definitely spilled in the backseat. “Mom.”

He might as well have screamed in her face. In a split second she was made of knives again, perfectly straight and lethal in the seat next to him. “Fine, forget it.” She hissed smoke between her clenched teeth and moved exactly once, adder-like, to fling her cigarette out the window. “What the hell do I know.” 

Ford knew better than to answer that. The pawn shop loomed to their right, neon glow from the upper window sign flickering erratically and reflecting off the car hood. Just ahead, he could see the waffle shop that had also stood on the block for as long as he remembered. Mrs. Van den Berg still gave them all a special discount for that time years ago when they’d discovered the house poltergeist was really just her missing cat, trapped in the connecting walls between the buildings. But Ford wasn’t the one who’d sat by the air vent all day, coaxing it out with lunchmeat scraps and dramatic comic book readings. Maybe he’d never had the patience for that kind of thing. Maybe he wasn’t kind enough.

It was tempting to leave the car, pick up whatever groceries he could carry and escape inside without another word. But Ford knew if they didn’t address it now they wouldn’t address it at all. There would be no talking about it inside the house, where every third picture frame was still conspicuously empty and he’d spread his books over the bottom bunk to turn it into a second desk as soon as he came home. So he stayed where he was, took a deep breath, and stared at the car horn hard enough to bore a hole through it. “I can’t. I know you want us to talk again, to try to fix it. But I can’t, alright? And I certainly can’t drop everything I’m working for to go—“ He wrenched his hands off the steering wheel and flung them in the air, in the hopes it might stop them shaking. “—to go chasing after him!”

His mother still had the bottle in her lap. The glass pinged softly under her tapping fingernails. “Was never about forcing ya. Just puttin’ the option out there.”

Ford looked at her, still stone-eyed but slumped almost imperceptibly in her seat. Then he curled one arm over the steering wheel and buried his face in it. “Dad had nothing to do with this car,” he realized.

She gave an airy sniff. “Your father’s a scrupulous man with his financials. Who’s to say what he did and didn’t spend money on.”

Ford tried not to do the math and failed miserably. How many hours of calls, at her rates, just for a down payment? He made an aggravated noise into his elbow. “I’m an idiot.”

“Hey now. Don’t you talk about my son that way.”

“We could try to return it to the dealer,” Ford offered, breathing in sweater fuzz. “Or you keep it.”

He heard jangling earrings when she shook her head. “Nah, c’mon, I want you to have it for your own sake. You’re not a guy who stays in one place forever.” There was a sound of shifting leather, like she’d leaned in to touch him and thought better of it. “Listen, I know. Things are rough now and it was rotten of me to try to push anything. But nobody’s mad at you.” Ford imagined she meant it to be helpful. “Least of all me.”

She took his free hand and squeezed it gently, ran her thumb over all five fingers. After an aeon, he squeezed back.

“You do what you need, kiddo. Not what some nosy old fink wants.”

Home for four hours and he felt like wrung-out laundry already. An exciting new record. “I need some time.” Ford forced himself to turn his head towards her. “And to learn how to cook, if I want to survive another semester in the dorms. Can I help with dinner tonight?”

He could tell it took more than one try, but she smiled. “I’ll allow it.”

They unloaded the car together in the fading light, Ford gathering as many bags in his arms as he could while his mother picked up the loose odds and ends. He’d have to come back later to deal with the spilled flour all over the back carpet, but at least it didn’t stain like eggs or wine would have.

As they walked towards the steps she reached up (had to, these days) and ruffled the hair behind his ear. “You’re an okay kid, Stanford Pines. You know that?”

“Thanks, Mom,” Ford said.

“But you left your headlights on.”

“Shit,” Ford said, to her delight, twisting so fast he almost dropped everything. Upstairs, the window sign flickered again and went on burning, a soft violet glow over the sidewalk.

  

—

 

The Stanleymobile hit the fence head on and sailed over the cliffside doing seventy-four, which in all fairness still only made this the second most lethal passenger experience Ford had undergone in the last month. He tightened his grip on the armrest all the same and raised his voice over the guitar solo wailing full-blast from the speakers. “Stanley, is this really how you want to die after everything else we’ve just lived through?”

Stanley waited until they landed (thunderously, in a bramble patch, scattering a gang of terrified wood nymphs) before responding. “Wow, drama, from you? I’m completely surprised.” He skidded back onto the pavement to complete the improvised, ill-advised shortcut.

The show was all the more ludicrous for how unnecessary it was, of course. They weren’t running from anything, or even really in a hurry. The kids were home safe, the Shack had been cleaned out enough for its new management to start cluttering it up in new and innovative ways, and based on Ford’s meticulous leyline charting they still had a few weeks if they wanted to launch an expedition within a favorable anomaly-tracking window. For the first time in too long, for either of them, they could afford a little idleness.

And yet, sometime after they’d pulled away from the Mystery Shack for their out-of-town supply run and crossed the second or third bend in the road, the unspoken realization that they were in the same car—in the _same_ car—for the first time in decades with nothing but time and potential ahead of them had struck them both in the same instant. Stanley, being Stanley, decided that this made it his mission to demonstrate every exciting new way he’d discovered in the interim to break the laws of physics, the road, and any kind of feasible vehicle warranty. They’d plowed over a stop sign a few turns back. Ford was pretty sure bits of it were now fused to the undercarriage, making it stronger.

“I don’t know how this thing survives everything you throw at it,” he marveled, running a hand along the ‘El Diablo’ logo inscribed on the door interior in mixed sympathy and awe while watching mangled twigs fly off the windshield. “By rights it should disintegrate right out from under us.”

Pride crackled in Stanley’s voice. “Hey, hey, this old girl would never punk out on me like that! She’s as loyal as she is indestructible.” He pounded a fist on the horn for emphasis. It sounded dreadful, but in an admittedly defiant way.

Ford grimaced as they ran over another rock, or at least something he very much hoped was a rock. While he hated to admit it, going back to a primitive combustible engine after years of more advanced transit took a longer adjustment period than he’d anticipated. “If only my organs could say the same.” He hauled himself out of the faded leather seat’s embrace and fumbled queasily for the glovebox, unjamming the stuck handle on the third try. It wasn’t until he had it open that he realized he was operating on muscle memory, and it was utterly ridiculous to expect—but there it was anyway. His hand closed around something inside and he pulled it out, turning it over in the flickering tree-filtered sunlight. The packaging was a little different after forty-odd years, glossier and not quite the same shade of green, but something told him that of all the things that had changed completely while he was away, gum recipes would be fairly unscathed. He wasn’t sure if he found the thought comforting or not. It made him feel a few different ages all at once, but none so much as old.

Stanley must have noticed his hesitation, because he spoke up before Ford could say anything. “It’s not like it’s the same pack or anything, mister health inspector. Dipper kept gettin’ woozy the first week whenever I drove ‘em around, so I figured maybe the same trick’d work for him that did for you back in the day. Pretty annoying when I was right, honestly.” He brightened. “But I guess a sickly nerd is a sickly nerd is a sickly nerd.”

“It’s a common affliction,” Ford said, spell broken as he pulled a stick out for himself, “when your driver treats lanes as a suggestion.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Stanly swerved around a fallen log in a more complicated maneuver than was strictly necessary. “Hey, refresh a poor old hero’s memory, was it you or me Mom said would never make it to the moon ‘cause they’d have to keep pulling the rocket over every five minutes?” Ford bounced the wrapper off his head and he laughed.

They drove in relative silence for a while, Ford chewing, Stanley humming along with the radio under his breath even as he constantly switched between stations, and a few gnomes and river spirits hollering in annoyance as the El Diablo tore past their neighborhoods in its onslaught. The gum settled Ford’s stomach, which freed up his thoughts to cause problems of their own. In the immediate rush of stepping through the portal and alternately dreading, scrambling to prevent, and surviving the apocalypse, there were questions he’d pushed aside, because he’d always been of mind that the fate of the universe trumped personal interest. But they’d started gnawing at him again in the aftermath, and he had to wonder if Stan had been steeling himself to answer, even before they’d gone back on speaking terms.

Regardless, Ford spoke first. “I don’t suppose you kept in touch back home very well over the years. Given all the subterfuge.”

Stanley shrugged next to him in a way a less traveled observer might call nonchalant. “Yeah, not really. Kept some tabs here and there, but I couldn’t risk blowing my cover, you know? Plus, uh.” Ford didn’t have to look to know he was avoiding eye contact. “The way _we_ kept in touch, an’ after looking around the place when you left, I wasn’t totally sure it’d be in character. No offense.”

Ford tried to remember the last time he’d called home. Certainly before that winter. Likely for a while before that, too. There had been more important things. “That’s fair,” he decided. He turned the next question over on his tongue, trying and failing to let artificial mint flavor overpower the dust in his mouth. “So…”

“November fourteenth, nineteen eighty-seven,” Stanley said firmly, leaning back a little in his seat. For once, he kept his eyes on the road. “Then Dad in ninety-five. I forget the exact date; that one’s still kinda fuzzy coming back. Sometime sunnier.”

Ford nodded at the information, which after all shouldn’t have been any great surprise, and turned his attention to the thick canopy of trees tunneling them in on either side. Then he thought about it and frowned. “‘ _Eighty-seven_? That soon?”

Stanley’s laugh was harsher this time. “Total fuckin’ crock, right? I thought for sure she’d be around to watch the sun explode and complain about it." He shrugged again, even less convincingly this time. “Ah, but I guess she was never all that gentle on herself.”

Fleeing between dimensions on a moment’s notice for years on end meant having neither the luxury nor burden of stopping to think about what he might be missing. Ford tried to imagine being just as distant, but locked in place. “I’m sorry, Stanley.”

“Not angry atcha,” Stanley insisted. “I mean, I was, but not as much as at me. Ah, hell. This won’t go anywhere.” He took a hand off the wheel to punch Ford lightly in the shoulder. “Let’s just go pick ourselves a boat for now, huh? Later we can get all plastered and nostalgic and throw some tacky clamshell tourist art into the sea in remembrance.”

Ford smiled. “She’d like that." 

“Damn right.” Stanley nodded as if to seal the motion. “So hey!” He said a few seconds later, changing tones. “You probably studied all that psycho mumbo-jumbo along with the rest of this garbage, right?” He gestured at the outdoors around them, which was teeming with the garbage in question. “Think she was on the money with any of it?”

It was probably a facetious question, but Ford turned it over anyway as a man of science. “I think there were things she considered inevitable,” he decided. “And she understood people enough to put herself a step ahead of them most of the time. But that might just be what grifters and mothers do.” The radio fizzled into static as they pulled out of range from the current station, and Ford beat Stanley to the dial to begin hunting for a new one. “From what the children have shown me, she was completely wrong about how fashion would turn out in the rest of the 80s, though.”

“Well, God, can you blame her? People gotta have a little hope in their lives.”

They broke free of the forest a few minutes later, leaving the trees and most of Gravity Falls behind for the open road. The mountains would follow them for a while longer, due to the trick of perspective, but eventually if they kept driving they too would be less than a speck in the distance. Which was fine. Ford had no way of knowing everything the El Diablo had seen, crushed, and endured in its travels since he’d last sat in it, and he suspected that even if he asked and Stanley agreed to share, he would never have the complete story. But if the paint was a little less fresh and the dashboard a little more covered in rainbow stickers than Ford remembered, he felt with a strange confidence that, whether out of spite or tenacity or probably illegal military-grade welding, it would hold itself together for them until they both reached the sea.

 


End file.
